Dear Girls Above Me: Inspired by a True Story by Charles Mcdowell Read Free Book Online

incident in my childhood when my family neglected me. Most likely this fear comes from the time I took part in a local jump-rope competition at my middle school. Neither my parents nor my sisters showed up to watch me take home the gold … jump rope. I remember looking out into the crowd during my awe-inspiring grand finale, and there were the cliché empty seats where my family was supposed to be. To be fair, there were about forty empty seats. In fact, there were only two people sittingdown, and they were both the grandparents of the student in charge of holding the stopwatch. Regardless, I prefer to blame most of my unique and challenging problems on this particular incident.
    Intimacy issues … The jump rope competition.
    Fear of rabbits … The jump rope competition.
    Attention deficit disorder … The jump rope competition.
    Annoying way of phrasing words … The jump rope competish.
    Motion sickness … The jump rope competition.
    Inability to walk in a straight line (even while I’m sober) … The jump rope competition.
    “Come on, Charlie. Be strong.” Yes, I whispered those words out loud to myself. I needed some extra motivation to actually go through with knocking, so why not act like a crazy person? As I slowly got closer and closer, roars of laughter from what sounded like three hundred females echoed through their door. I was petrified. I’m not going to lie, I almost turned back. But since I had already accepted that in my lifetime I would never reach the summit (or the base camp, for that matter) of Mount Kilimanjaro, this would be my version of a treacherous trek.
    So, I went for it. I raised my fist, which was conveniently still clenched from my previous encounter with the landlord, and I pounded on the door. Well, I pretended to pound. In reality I timidly knocked in the pathetic hope that they wouldn’t hear it and Icould proudly walk back to my apartment, all while telling myself, “At least you tried, killer.” But then suddenly, the door opened before I could walk away. I froze. A young twentysomething girl stood in front of me, but she wasn’t one of the girls above me. She looked me up and down and couldn’t have hidden her disappointment even if she tried. Which she didn’t. “If I’d looked through the peephole before answering, I never would’ve opened the door,” she said. The jump rope competish all over again. “Ugh, we’re totally not interested in changing religions.”
    “Okay. Good to know,” I said, having no clue what she was talking about.
    “That’s why you’re here, right?” She stared at Mr. Molever’s binder, clearly mistaking it for some kind of religious recruiting book. “You want to convert us to whatevs your religion is.”
    “No. I’m just a guy with a beard.” Thankfully I wasn’t wearing a black tie, otherwise things could’ve gotten really awkward. “Actually, I’m the neighbor who lives below.”
    “Oh, okay … It’s just … your beard. It really threw me off.” I could hear my mother saying, “See!” From her makeup and platinum-blond hair, I stereotyped her as a friend of Cathy and Claire. She was pretty enough, in an amateur-porn-star sort of way; like “I’ll make a sex tape and just conveniently leave it around and when someone finds it I’ll act like I’m outraged but really I’ll be flattered.” You know the type. This is not a girl you bring home to mom, unless you want to send mom into severe emotional trauma. Either her lips had been recently stung by an entire beehive, or she had made friends with a Beverly Hills doctor who had enormous plans for her, and even bigger plans for her prodigious mouth. Just then, from the other room, I heard a familiar voice call out, “Bridget, is someone at the door?”
    A harem suddenly gathered around Bridget to see what thecommotion was all about. They studied me as if I were a chimpanzee who had just awakened from an unsuccessful scientific experiment. Silent farts